It is also interesting to see how the google searches of `Coronavirus` spread throughout the country. The virus first surged in Lombardy which resulted in earlier and stricter measures than the rest of Italy. Indeed, we assumed that despite being with the same nation and subject to national TV and measures, the geographical presence of the COVID crisis has a huge impact on people’s search attitudes. The following animation shows precisely the regional searches over time.
As expected, we observe that the initial spikes in Lombardia spread first to the neighbouring regions before reaching the entire Italy within days. This indicates that the geographic closeness of both measures and news highly impacts the search patterns. By the time of the national lockdown, a relatively uniform search pattern is observed. As already in the previous graph, we see the close relation of the search interest in respect to government measures which we believe to be closer than with actual epidemic data.
The next question we wondered is what about “coronavirus” do people want to know most, i.e. what terms do they search for together?